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In my first post on this subject, I demonstrated how to enable the Wacom Bamboo CTL460 on Ubuntu 10.04. Since then, I have received a number of questions which gave me the impression that some items need a more thorough explanation. Following the Q&A, I will repeat my steps from my previous post. This time with a slightly newer version of the driver. The steps are the same.

Wacom Bamboo CTL460

Questions and Answers

If you have some other Wacom tablet besides the model CTL460, these instructions may not work for you. You are welcome to try them. Since I only have the model CTL460, I am limited in the amount of advice that I can give you for whatever model you have. If you can’t figure it out and I’m unable to help, you should try contacting the maintainer of the linuxwacom project or the author of the driver. (modinfo wacom | grep author)

Question: My Wacom tablet used to work under Ubuntu 9.xx, or 8.xx. Why won’t it work under 10.04?

Answer:

One myth that needs to be addressed, is that the Wacom CTL460 is supported by Ubuntu 10.04 and will work out-of-the-box. That is not true. If you had a previous version of Ubuntu and your Wacom CTL460 worked out-of-the-box, you need to realize that it no longer just works out-of-the-box. There have been some changes to xorg since then. In addition, if you have been using instructions in the past (previous to 10.04) which included making changes to /etc/udev/rules.d, you can throw those out. Those instructions do not apply anymore. Furthermore, you do not need to install the package xserver-xorg-input-wacom. That package contains code that does not work for this tablet. You can remove it if you want since it has no impact on the rest of these instructions.

Question: Your steps worked great but one day I rebooted and my tablet doesn’t work anymore. Help?

Answer:

You recently ran Update Manager and one of the packages you updated was the kernel image package. Not a problem. This is normal and to be expected. You need to follow the steps again each time the kernel image package is updated to reinstall a new driver.

Question: I was trying to configure my table in Gimp but I did not see a wacom input device. Help?

Answer:

Make sure that your tablet is plugged in and working before you start the Gimp application.

Question: Help? I was following your steps but I noticed the following message:

Note: this package only supports Xorg server older than 1.6.5.
You are running a newer version.
Please build xf86-input-wacom instead.

That is all. You can plug in your Wacom CTL460 Bamboo tablet and begin using it.

If you take anything away from this exercise please remember this

What we did was replace the wacom driver that comes with the kernel package. We simple copied our newly built wacom driver in its place. Whenever you update the kernel package, you need to follow these steps again. Be sure to reboot first so that you are running the new kernel prior to rebuilding a new driver.

If you don’t want to download a new version from Sourceforge, you can keep the folder from above and reuse it. In that case you just need to do the following steps (don’t overlook the make clean below):

I recently purchased a Wacom Bamboo digital pen and tablet. It’s not supported for Linux. However, with the help of some open source drivers, the pen and tablet will work nicely. It’s not recognized out of the box by Ubuntu. After I connected it to the usb port, I see that the tablet is powered up. The led on the table is on, and lsusb shows the device ID.

The Wacom tablet should be recognized now when you connect it to the usb port. The pen should now be able to function as a mouse. Now let’s get the pressure sensitivity working in an application like Gimp. Start Gimp and go to Edit|Preferences.Select Input Devices and Configure Extended Input Devices…

Select Device: Wacom Bamboo Pen 4×5, and Mode: Screen. Save those choices and Close. Now lets do a simple test of the pen tool. Go to the Gimp menu bar, select File|New… Choose a template. I’ll choose 800×600 for this test. Then choose the paintbrush tool from the toolbox. I’ll use a caligraphy brush tip for this. Now write something and use variable amounts of pressure and you should see that “paint” has various levels of darkness depending on the amount of pressure.

Sorry, my example is very basic. This should be enough to get you going. Enjoy.